Mostly true…
https://medium.com/@ssg/how-is-computer-programming-different-today-than-20-years-ago-9d0154d1b6ce
I particularly liked:
“Since we have much faster CPUs now, numerical calculations are done in Python which is much slower than Fortran. So numerical calculations basically take the same amount of time as they did 20 years ago.”
https://medium.com/@ssg/how-is-computer-programming-different-today-than-20-years-ago-9d0154d1b6ce
Early morning off to D.C. I’m sad that I’ll miss the potential snow!
Before the snow comes I thought I would get a few drone shots. It has been a few weeks since I last took some, and this seemed to be the calm before the storm.
Here are some 360 degree photos of the current state of construction. We are getting closer!
Legend.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/neil-peart-obit-1.5422806
Ceiling is done, and some tile has made its way into place. Fireplace is getting stone.
700,000 lumens of shop lighting, and 3500 sq ft of shop flooring! Two color patterns, one for the shop and one for the lower garage. For the upper garage I’ll do an epoxy of some kind.
I like these tiles in part because it makes working in the garage/shop much easier on the feet. will put a small insulation layer below these as well, which gives it a little more give. I have the same tiles in my current shop, and installation is pretty easy as they snap together.
It has been a few weeks since I a new house update – Things slow down a little bit over the holidays, but things are still progressing. We decided to stain the ceiling wood before installing it, so over the holidays the painters took care of that, which was a good activity when less people are around as you have to wear a respirator when doing that kind of stuff.
The ceiling is getting the wood installed slowly, and that task should be done by the end of the week. Tile work has started in a few places, and the heated floor is awaiting city inspection.
My vault door arrived and was installed. It was a bit challenging only because of the mass. That door weighs about 1000lbs, so it takes some care to move it around.
The concrete pads around the side of the house were poured as well as the pad for the generator (which has buried conduit for the gas line and the electrical).
I had a chance to do a few shots with my mobile astrophotography setup. No telescope, just a small tripod and tracking mount and my Pentax DSLR. I did a few shots in Orion (the orion nebula, and the flame and horsehead), plus one wide shot. These were mostly 40-50 second exposures stacked (details in each picture description). A very rough polar alignment worked better than I expected. I did a few test exposures at 2 mins and had just a bit of star trails.
I also had some satellite/object crossings during the exposures, and my friend Vareck Bostrom was able to track down what the objects were. ( Vareck runs his own TLE processing and modeling environment, so he was able to take just the pictures and plate solve to get the coordinates and then feed those into a search. ). Much to my surprise both of them were 𝐅𝐚𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐧 𝟗 𝐑𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐞𝐠𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 that were left over from two different geosynchronous orbital deliveries done in 2017. These booster bodies are about 14m long, so not huge. They have pretty high eccentricities, as one was about 13,000 km away while the other was 9,000km. More details about the tracking in the two pictures with the trails.